The new contract recognises the GP crisis – but it has a hidden agenda

In the new five-year GP contract, general practice has finally received sufficient funding from the Government that, on the surface, claims to offer a solution to the incredible strain that has been undermining patient care for the best part of a decade.

Plans are laid out for an expanded workforce, for tackling the avalanche of paperwork and for rescuing practices that face collapse.

It also provides support for doctors buckling under this strain, with services to help address burnout and stress, and pledges to introduce a range of other professionals - such as pharmacists, physiotherapists and nurses - to the workforce, in a bid to help share the workload.

On the face of it, this is a credible vision, bringing together a number of different strategies in a genuine effort to help general practice.

This new contract is designed as an endgame – with the final stages seeing the GP workforce replaced with low-paid pharmacists, physiotherapists and nurses.

This new contract is designed as an endgame – with the GP workforce replaced with low-paid pharmacists, physiotherapists and nurses

Rate this article
(4.52 average user rating)

Readers' comments (13)

I also agree that further down the line networks will have to become one practice eventually and salaried . Bring it on because where will you find a salaried GP to work till 8 pm at night doing paperwork unpaid !
It is also unrealistic time scales involved . Where am I to get medical indemnity. No one has said who to contact or register .

This is not the end-game, the endgame as @9.17 points out is the formation of super-practices. Partnership will be reduced to John Lewis model. No autonomy, more patients, less continuity. And where will the GPs go? Out the door. There’s a reason why the GPs setting up the federations do little or no clinical work - they’ve created a monster they can’t handle. And those remaining will spend the next decade trying to go back to tradional sizes practices, in vain. The time to fight is now. This will be the death knell for general practice.